ARCHIVES 2019 / MEMENTO MORI

A stranger appears in the main square of the village. He wants to buy a piece of land to turn it into a rice paddy; but the seller is late. While waiting in this place where the vegetation seems to be dying for no reason, he talks with a woman he thinks is the caretaker. A rebellious woman who speaks in enigmas, she has a visceral link to the earth—one that is incompatible with the stranger's project—and which she has to pass on. This telluric fable explores the possibility of a true meeting between two beings opposed to each other through the reconstruction of bonds of meaning, through a double recognition: that of the other as a random but precious element of the world and of the earth as host of humanity.

Hala Moughanie lives in Lebanon. She is a writer and a consultant in the field of international cooperation. Her texts try to dissect our ways of experiencing the world by questioning the notion of identity and the way it is articulated in our relationships to others, to the places we live in or imagine, and to history. She tries to approach language—whose formal uses are an integral part of political systems—in a new way to give back to words their deeper meaning. Her first text for the theatre, Tais-toi et creuse, won an Artcena prize as well as the prix RFI Théâtre 2015 and the Cross-Channel Theater Prize (2017). Her second play, La mer est ma nation (2017), for which she was awarded an Artcena grant, won the Prix du quartier des auteurs du Tarmac in 2018. Her latest text, Memento Mori (2019), was partly adapted for Marc Agbedjidji's Fissures at the festival des francophonies en Limousin in September 2018.